It's been about eight years - I'd had a scanner and a printer and Photoshop.
The years and the three kids etc got in the way of staying current on these things.

Nowadays I still have computers etc and the printer here is a Canon laser printer (black/white) but I haven't kept up on Photoshop.
Is there a freeware surrogate that's up to the challenge for sharpening up images for doing transfer?
I'm also hoping my current Canon B/W printer will do...

At first I'll be working on letter/number engraving.
Is there a treasure trove of good font types for download somewhere?

Somewhere on Adobe's site you can download a suite including Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, Acrobat Reader, Fonts, etc. It's a free download, but unsupported or upgradeable. The whole download is dated June, 2013. I think it was the last version for WinXP, before the conversion to Win7. However, it works fine on Win10, just lacks some of the bells and whistles that advance users understand.